No More Learning

Next come the dreams of Novosiltzov, and
these are horrible nightmares provoked by demons.
The scene shifts to the Warsaw salons where the
talk runs on what is happening in Lithuania.
Here one of the guests tells the history of his
friend Cichowski. The strong simplicity of the
language in which Mickiewicz relates this story
adds to the pity of its tragedy. I cannot attempt
to present this celebrated passage in anything
more than a prose translation which, while giving
no conception of the art of Mickiewicz's poem,
will, at least, reproduce its facts.
"I knew him when I was a child. He was young
then, lively, witty, and gay, famous for his good
looks. He was the life of the company. He amused
everyone with his stories and jgk^s, He loved
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 79
children, and took me often on his knee. Then he
married. I remember that he brought to us
children presents from his betrothed, and invited
us to his wedding. Then for a long time he never
came, and it was said in my home that he had
disappeared, no one knew where. The government
sought for him, but could find out no trace of
him. At last it was said that he had killed himself,
that he was drowned. The police found his cloak
on the banks of the Vistula. They brought the
cloak to his wife. She recognized it. He was dead.
They did not find his body--and so a year passed
away. Why did he kill himself? This was asked,
was inquired into. He was mourned, he was wept
for. Finally, he was forgotten. And two years
went by. One evening they were taking prisoners
to the Belvedere from another prison. The even-
ing was rainy and dark. Some one, whether by
chance or on purpose, was a spectator of this
procession. Perhaps it was one of the brave youths
of Warsaw who keep a watch on the whereabouts
and names of the prisoners. Patrols were in the
streets, dead silence in the town. Then someone
cried out from behind a wall: 'Prisoners, who
are you? ' A hundred names answered. Among
them his name was heard: and the next day his
wife was told. She wrote and she ran, she begged,
she implored; but she heard nothing save that
one name. And again three years passed on with
no trace, with no news. But, in some unknown
way, it was spread through Warsaw that he was
alive, that he was being tortured, that he refused
to tell anything, and that so far he had told
nothing; that for many nights they would not
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? 80 POLAND
allow him to sleep; that they fed him on herrings
and gave him nothing to drink; that they drugged
him with opium, and sent horrible apparitions
and monsters upon him; that they tickled his
soles and his armpits. But soon other prisoners
were taken, the talk began about others. Only
his wife wept, all the others forgot.
"Till, not long ago, they rang at his wife's
house one night. The door was opened. An officer
and a gendarme, armed, and a prisoner. It was
he! They ordered pen and paper for him to sign
that he had returned alive from the Belvedere.
They took the note, and threatened him with their
fingers: 'If you let out . . . . ' and they did not
finish. They went as they came. It was he. I ran
to see him. A friend warned me, ' Do not go to*-
day, for you will find a spy at the gate. ' The next
day I went. There were the soldiers of the police
in the hall. I went in a week's time. It was he who
would not receive me : he was ill. Then, not long
ago, I met him driving outside the town. They
told me it was he, for I did not know him. He had
grown fat, but it was a horrible fatness. He was
swollen by bad food and poisonous air. His cheeks
? were puffy, yellow, and pale. His forehead was
wrinkled as if he were half a century old; he had
lost all his hair. I bade him welcome. He did not
know me. He did not wish to speak to me. I told
him who I was. He looked at me without seeing me.
When I spoke of the details of our old acquaintance,
he fixed his eyes inquiringly on me. Ah! all that
he had suffered in his torments by day and all that
he had thought through in his sleepless nights,
J knew it all in that one minute from his eyes.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 81
"In a month's time I went again. I thought
that by then he would have been able to look
about in the world, and to call back his memory.
But he had been so many thousand days under
the ordeal of the inquisition, so many thousand
nights he had communed alone with himself, so
many years tyrants had carried on the inquiry by
torture, so many years he had been surrounded
by walls that had ears, when his only defence was
silence, and his only companion darkness, that a
gay city could not blot out in one month the
lesson of so many years. To him the sun is a spy,
the day his traducer, his servants his jailors, each
guest is his enemy. If a visitor comes to his house,
at the sound of the bolt being unshot, he immedi-
ately thinks: 'They are coming for the in-
quisition. ' He turns his back, he leans his head on
his hand. It appears he is gathering together his
presence of mind, all the powers of his brain. He
compresses his lips, so that no words shall escape
them. He casts down his eyes that the spies may
guess nothing from his eyes. If the visitors ask
him a question, he, still believing he is in prison,
rushes to the other end of the room, and escapes
there in the shadows, crying out always two
phrases: 'I know nothing. I shall say nothing. '
And these two phrases are his watchword. And
his wife and child weep long on their knees before
him, till he can conquer his fear and his horror. "
We pass back again to Wilna: to Novosiltzov,
giving a banquet, spurning the blind mother, as
she implores him to let her visit her prisoner son
who is being flogged to death, and whose fate
haunted Konrad as he lay unconscious. But where
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? POLAND
all this time is Konrad? The friar has stood
before Novosiltzov warning him that upon him
and his ministers God's vengeance is about to
fall--and it is a fact that sudden death and dis-
aster overtook the prime movers in the persecu-
tion of the Lithuanian youths. On his way from
Novosiltzov's rooms, the priest meets Konrad,
who is being conducted by soldiers to his examin-
ation. Konrad stops and gazes, bewildered. He
believes he has never seen the priest as a living
man. It must have been in a dream that the friar
came to his aid. He hails him therefore as the
friend of a dream, and thanks him for a gift of
which, so he thinks, only his own conscience is
aware.
"Thou shalt go," says the priest, "on a far
and an unknown road. Thou wilt be in the crowd
of the great, the rich, the learned. Seek thou the
man who knoweth more than they. Thou wilt
know him, for he will be the first to greet thee in
the name of God. "
This is supposed to be a further reference to
Towianski.
"What is this ? " cries Konrad, struck by the
familiar sound of the voice that had consoled him
in the hour of his agony. " Is it thou? What may
this be? Stop a moment for the love of God. "
"Farewell, I cannot," replies the priest; and
Konrad is hurried off by the soldiers.
His next and last entry into the strange, mystic
drama is shrouded in the veils of mystery. The
feast of the Ancestors is being held again as in the
beginning of the play. The wizard and the woman
whom Gustavus loved are in the cemetery. The
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 83
woman entreats the phantom that appeared with
his bleeding heart in the past to show himself to
her once more. The songs of the incantations are
wafted to their ears. Graves open. Spirits float
about them. Only the lover does not come. The
hour of cock-crow is here. The night of the Ances-
tors is run. The two who watch cry in vain upon
the name of Gustavus.
"Thy lover," says the wizard, "hath either
changed the faith of his fathers, or hath changed
his old name. See how the dawn draws nigh. The
wizard's powers are gone. Thy lover will not
come. "
But from the west a band of prison carts
appears amidst clouds of snow, rushing to the
north. The lover is there. He turns back to gaze--
only once, but what a look is that farewell to
Lithuania! His heart is bleeding with a thousand
wounds which have now entered his soul--the
wounds of his country, which death only can
heal. On his forehead he carries a black stain
which, says the wizard, even death may not cure
--his self-inflicted wound, his blasphemy.
"Ah, great God, cure him," cries Gustavus'
love; and the play ends.
To the irreparable loss of literature, the drama
was never finished. Mickiewicz intended to have
brought it down to the events following the
Rising of 1830, and to have developed the action
in the Russian prisons and Siberia. His poetic
genius was tragically silenced, and the Ancestors
stands as a magnificent and incomplete monument
to the sufferings of Poland. " I read the poem on
my knees," wrote Bohdan Zaleski. "Since the
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? 84
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tears and the imprecations of the prophets of
Sion," so said George Sand, "no voice has been
raised with a like power to sing a subject as vast
as that of a nation's fall. "
Ill
Shortly after Mickiewicz had written the Third
Part of the Ancestors, he joined the Polish Emigra-
tion in Paris. From that date, 1832, his home was
in Paris for the rest of his life, with the exception
of the year and a half--1839 to --when he
held the chair of Latin Literature at the Univer-
sity of Lausanne. He devoted himself to the exiles
and outcasts of his nation. He laboured for them
without stint, giving ungrudgingly out of his
own dire poverty, harbouring the homeless when
he himself could scarcely keep a roof above his
head, conferring strength and consolation, not
only by his written word, but by the moral force
of his life and by his rare gift of influence over
the souls of others. He became the chief moral
leader of his people and the object of their im-
passioned affection. He taught them that only
by personal regeneration could they hope to see
their country restored; that true patriotism
must reform the individual to secure the nation's
redemption. For the guidance of his fellow exiles
he wrote the Book of the Polish Pilgrimage. Mickie-
wicz had a deep-seated conviction that Poland
was the chosen emissary of the higher future of
mankind, and that therefore her sons were to be
the apostles of the future^ It thus followed that
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 85
the Polish Emigration was a providential means of
spreading the new light over the face of the world.
The Polish exiles were, therefore, exiles no more,
but pilgrims. They must prove themselves worthy
of that calling. So in his Book of the Polish Pil-
grimage he puts together in a species of Biblical
prose a string of counsels for the Polish pilgrim.
Material strength meant little to a man like
Mickiewicz. The power of the idea was every-
thing. It mattered nothing that at the moment
he wrote this book no visible sign of Poland's
resurrection could be discerned on the political
horizon. He believed with full confidence that the
moment of her triumph and the consequent
spiritual rebirth of the universe was approaching.
It is on these lines that his instructions for the
Polish exiles run: worded in pithy aphorisms, or
in parables.
"The greatness and the strength of the war-
ships are good, but without stars and the compass
they are nought. And the star of the pilgrimage
is heavenly faith, and the magnetic needle is the
love of your country. The star shineth for all,
and the needle pointeth ever to the north. And
of a surety, with that needle, we may sail on the
eastern and western seas, and without it even on
the northern sea there will be wandering and
shipwreck. "
"Why has the power of resurrection been given
to your nation? Not because she was powerful,"
like Rome, nor wise as Greece, glorious as Venice
and Genoa, for they have all fallen and will not
rise again. "But you will be woken from the
grave, as having faith, hope, and love. "
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"Polish pilgrim, thou wast rich, and lo! thou
sufferest poverty and need, that thou mayest
know what are poverty and need, and that when
thou returnest to thy country thou shalt say:
'The poor and needy are my co-heirs. '"
Wisdom is not with the great ones of this earth.
It has been lost from public life. " And the wise
among you," cries he whose soul was on fire with
hunger and thirst for the things that make for
righteousness, " are not those who have enriched
themselves selling their learning, and have bought
for themselves goods and houses, and have won
gold and favours from kings: but they who have
announced to you the word of freedom, and have
suffered imprisonment and rods. And they who
shall seal their doctrine with their death shall be
blessed. "
Then must the pilgrim of the country to which
Mickiewicz looked for the world's spiritualization,
the unarmed pilgrim face to face with the govern-
ments of Europe, take heart, for a few poor fisher-
men were victorious over Rome. Let the Polish
pilgrims beware of confounding civilization in its
ordinary signification--the cult of the luxury
and materialization that have overspread Europe
--with the higher civilization of Christian self-
sacrifice. They must not be overwhelmed by
the strength that lies behind that so-called civili-
zation; for it is their lot to inculcate upon the
nations that have lost all faith, and whose only god
is gross materiality, the civilization of Christ.
Malaria in a fever-stricken district must be
stamped out by searching for its cause. The man
who sits at home, instead of leaving it to fight
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 87
against evil, will be attacked by that evil in his
own dwelling-place.
The deadliest foes of the Polish nation are not
those who destroyed Poland, but the worshippers
of power and interest. The talent of the Pole is
not for himself: all must be given to his country.
High posts, official dignities, earthly lordships,
what are these for the Poles among whom there
must be brotherly love alone?
"In your pilgrimage in a strange country you
are as the people of God in the desert. " Those
who complained, even in the secret of their heart,
perished without seeing the promised land. " So
beware ye of the sin of lamentation and doubt,
that you shall not lengthen the days of your
pilgrimage. " And that Pole who does not believe
in the resurrection of Poland shall be banished,
till he repents, from the ranks of the pilgrimage.
"As in the city of the Jews, Christ and His
religion arose, so in the cities of Europe will arise
your religion, the new religion of self-sacrifice
and love. "
"The nations shall be redeemed by the merits
of a martyred nation, and shall be re-christened
in the name of God and liberty. And who is thus
christened shall be your brother. "
"Sow ye the seed of the love of your country
and the spirit of self-sacrifice, and be ye sure that
the Republic will grow forth mighty and fair.
. . . Truly I say unto you inquire not what the
government in Poland will be. It is enough for
you to know that it will be better than any of
which you know. Nor ask as to her boundaries,
for they will be greater than ever before. And
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? 88
POLAND
each of you has in his soul the seed of the future
laws and the measure of the future boundaries.
For inasmuch as you make your soul greater and
better, so much will you better your laws and
increase your boundaries. "
These extracts may give some general impres-
sion of what is not the most poetical, but one of
the frankest expressions of Polish Messianism.
The poet finished his book of rules for the pilgrim
with a cry from his heart, the prayer and the
litany of the Pole.
"Lord God, Who canst do all things! The
children of a warrior nation lift up to Thee their
disarmed hands from all the ends of the world.
They cry to Thee from the depths of the mines
of Siberia and from the snows of Kamchatka,* and
from the deserts of Algeria, and from France, a
foreign land. But in our own fatherland, in
Poland, faithful to Thee, they may not call upon
Thee; and our old men, our women, and our
children pray to Thee in secret with their thoughts
and tears. God of the Jagiellos ! t God of Sobieski!
God of Kosciuszko! have pity on our country
and on us. Grant us to pray again to Thee as
our fathers prayed, on the battlefield with weapons
in our hands, before an altar made of drums and
cannons, beneath a canopy of our eagles and our
flags. And grant that our families may pray in the
churches of our towns and hamlets, and our
* Kamchatka is a convict settlement for the Poles. The
reference to Algeria is explained by the large number of Poles
who since the days of Napoleon served in the French Foreign
Legion.
t The Jagiello line of sovereigns under whom Poland attained
to her greatest power.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 89
children on our graves. But not our will but Thine
be done. "
"God the Father," run the supplications in
his litany, "Who didst lead Thy people forth
from the captivity of Egypt and didst restore
them to the Holy Land, restore us to our native
land.
"God the Son, Redeemer, Who wast tortured
and crucified, Who didst rise again from the dead
and Who dost reign in glory, raise our country
from the dead.
"Mother of God, whom our fathers called the
queen of Poland and of Lithuania, save Poland
and Lithuania . . .
"From Russian, Austrian and Prussian bondage,
deliver us, oh, Lord. By the martyrdom of thirty
thousand knights of Bar, who died for faith and
freedom, deliver us, oh, Lord. * By the martyr-
dom of twenty thousand citizens of Praga, slaugh-
tered for faith and freedom, deliver us, oh, Lord.
By the martyrdom of the youths of Lithuania,
slain by the knout, dead in the mines and in exile,
deliver us, oh, Lord. By the wounds, tears and
sufferings of all Polish prisoners, exiles, and pil-
grims, deliver us, oh Lord.
"For a universal war for the freedom of the
nations, we beseech Thee, oh, Lord. For the
national arms and eagles, we beseech Thee, oh,
Lord. For a happy death on the field of battle,
we beseech Thee, oh, Lord. For a grave for our
bones in our own earth, we beseech Thee, oh,
* The Confederation of Bar, headed by Caaimir Pulawski, fought
Russia for four years (1768-1772), in defence of their country's
existence.
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Lord. For the independence, integrity and free-
dom of our country, we beseech Thee, oh, Lord. "
Mickiewicz's last and greatest poem followed
the Book of the Pilgrimage by two years; but, in
order not to interrupt the narrative that yet
remains of the rest of the poet's life, I will return
to Thaddeus later. \Poverty, domestic griefs,
sorrow for his nation, an endless yearning to behold
his native land again; such is the private history
of Adam Mickiewicz. Moments came when he
and his wife were almost starving. Yet through
all he maintained an unshaken composure of soul,
jhe confidence in Providence of one to whom the
unseen matters more than the vicissitudes of
earth. j
Before Mickiewicz moved to Lausanne, and
again after he returned to Paris to take up the
professorship of Slavonic literature at the College
de France, madness fell upon his wife.
. ^Dusjng his first year at the College, Mickie-
wicz compared each of his lectures to a hard-
fought battle. In the intervals of tending his wife
in her paroxysms of insanity he prepared the
lectures, on which his family of young children
depended for their maintenance, as best he might
out of a mind racked with suffering. Weighed
down by the tribulation of his home and the
national sorrows that had by now driven all joy
from his heart, he stood before his audience in
which sat the most brilliant men and women in
Paris, his sad face worn and wearied, but with the
fire behind it leaping forth whenever he spoke of
the nation he loved. In the summer of 1841, his
domestic troubles reached their climax, and it
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 91
x was found necessary to remove his wife to a mad-
house.
On his return from accompanying his wife to
the asylum, Mickiewicz sat alone in his desolate
home, broken with grief. A stranger from Lith-
uania entered his room. He told Adam that he""'
had words of great import, that he was endowed
with a message from God that should save both
the human race and their country, and that as a
proof of what he said he was able to cure the poet's
wife. In grievous doubt, Mickiewicz spent *he
night wrestling with his conscience as to whether.
he should accept the leading of this man, Andrew
Towianski, or no. He decided finally to go with
Towianski to the asylum. The result was that his
wife was restored to health, probably by a species
of magnetism, and that Mickiewicz became the
chief apostle of the mystic system inaugurated
by the new prophet.
The scope of this book does not permit me to
dwell upon this episode of Mickiewicz's life, or
upon the personality and teaching of the mystic
Towianski, which latter have been a fruitful sub-^
ject for controversy. I have t^ild the story more
fully in a different place. * Suffice it" to say that,
with a whole-hearted faith in Towianski's mission,
Mickiewicz sacrificed poetic genius, position,
friendship. Since the hour that he felL^n with
Towianski, the creator of the Ancestors an&Thaddeus
couldnever again enrich theliteratureof his mother-'
tongue with his splendid poetry. His lectureship
in the College de France became a pulpit for his
mysticism. His adherence to Towianism lost him
* See my Adam Miikiewia, tht National Poet of Poland.
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POLAND
this, his last remaining, self-expression and only
means of livelihood, for, part of the Towianskian
doctrines being a semi-deification of Napoleon-
ism, the French Government expelled him from
his chair. For the best years of his manhood he
gave himself up to the propagation of a neurotic
form of mysticism because he believed it would
bring salvation to Poland and the human race.
Before his death he emerged from the ordeal of
a religion that exacted of its followers a perpetual
state of ecstasy, prematurely aged, broken by
spiritual strain; but with his moral grandeur
unimpaired. None of the bitter disillusions and
disappointments that dogged his life could ever
weaken his hope in the resurrection of his nation
or his faith in the ideal. He died as he had lived,
a sacrifice for his country, his last hours spent in
her service. During the Crimean War, he went to
Constantinople to organize a Polish legion to
fight for Turkey. Filled with sadness at the failure
of this enterprise on which he had built a
patriot's dream, he was stricken down by Asiatic
cholera, and died on November 26th, 1855. A
Polish village in the outskirts of Constantinople
bears his name, and his memory still lingers in
the xapital of Turkey. His mortal remains now
lie in Cracow among the dead whom his nation
honours most.
/ '. . IV
Thaddeus (1834) is as great a national expression
as the Ancestors, albeit under a different aspect.
Artistically it is Mickiewicz's masterpiece. Where
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 93
the Ancestors is the tragedy of a nation and of
the soul suffering in that nation's suffering,
Thaddeus is an idyll of the Lithuania that Mickie-
wicz had lived in as a boy, told by the pen of
one who had loved and lost her.
The poem, said to be the finest epic of the nine-
teenth century, runs into twelve cantos. The
finished beauty and brilliance of the style, its
magnificent word-paintings of nature, were alone
enough to give it the place it holds in the history
of Poland's literature. But, apart from this, it has
always spoken directly to Polish sympathies.
There is scarcely any plot in the story. A
Lithuanian boy--the Thaddeus who gives his
name to the poem--returns to the country house
of his uncle Soplica, after completing his studies.
A sort of hereditary feud concerning the right
over a ruined castle is dragging on between this
family and another, of whom the last represen-
tative' is a sentimental young Count, a lover of
French fashions and of the pseudo romanticism
of his day. The quarrel is more nominal than
real; but a more serious question is behind it.
The father of Thaddeus, Jacek, was'in his youth
a suitor for the hand of Horeszko's daughter,
whom Mickiewicz, in memory of his own love,
calls Eva. His suit was rejected, according to the
old Polish custom, by a dish of dark soup being
handed to him at the table of the lady's father.
In a fury of revenge, he took to a wild lifef^ and
seized the moment of the Russian attack on the
Horeszko mansion during Kosciuszko's rising to
shoot the magnate dead. He then fled abroad,
fought by way of reparation in the Polish legions
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? 94 - POLAND
for Napoleon, and became a Bernardine monk.
Under the cowl and a feigned name he, through
the poem, serves as a national emissary from the
Polish legions to Lithuania. The Count, the last
remaining male scion of the Horeszko family, is
urged on by the" old retainer of the latter to fight
it out with the Soplicas. In the Lithuania of old,
where there were no police to enforce the decision
of the courts, the pleader had recourse to the
nobles, who summoned their armed friends and
the private armies that the more powerful of
them had at their disposal, and, with a legal officer
in their number, marched on the offender to exact
justice. The Count leads a like movement against
the Soplicas. While they are at blows with each
other, the Russians fall upon both with the result
that the Poles unite against their common foe.
Thaddeus and the Count go off to enrol them-
selves under the banners of the Polish legions.
They return with Napoleon's armies on that
march to Moscow, which the Poles hailed as the
herald of their country's resurrection. Every
quarrel is reconciled, and, with Thaddeus' marriage
to the granddaughter of the murdered Horeszko,
the family feud and the poem are happily ended.
Such is the outline of Thaddeus: but its power
and its charm lie in the wealth of its national
colouring, the vividness with which Mickiewicz
reproduced the types of his youth that, even
when he wrote the work, had gone for ever, the
magnificent descriptions of nature in wild and
romantic Lithuania, all set to the patriotic hope
that filled Poland in the last days of Napoleon's
glory. Men of a dead past rise again as though in
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl.